Berlin

OCTOBER 13, 2007

3:00 pm

Train to Berlin. The plan was entirely successful, save the shower. Apparently KLM airlines feels that a night without obscure feminine products is more inconvenient than one without shampoo. My bags were at the airport this morning, so I swapped out my laptop for clothes and checked my bags into airport storage. I grabbed a chicken wrap at the airport McDonald’s, which seemed like it might actually be healthy, but they had drowned it in ranch dressing. It tasted like America. I went to the airport train station (Flughafen Bahnhof) and found a train to Berlin 1 hour hence.

This train is not quite as English friendly as I found Frankfurt, but my German is coming along alright. I speak a mix to everyone; German where I can, English everywhere else. I’ve almost stopped staring slack-jawed and horrified when people approach me in German.

12:30 pm

Arriving in Berlin I spent some time deciphering the train system and eventually got on a few trains which I didn’t pay for and may or may not be covered by my railpass. The train system here seems to operate on some sort of honor system whereby you buy tickets that are not required to board and are, from what I’ve seen, never checked. The first hostel I tried was full, but the receptionist made some phone calls for me and found me a bed about 20 minutes away. I checked in for two nights and instantly took a shower.

Afterwards I went for a bit of a walk through a pretty bustling but run down area of Berlin that I believe was part of ‘North Mitte.’ There were some cool buildings, etc., and I also saw more hookers than I’ve ever seen in my life (probably ~10), and unlike those I’ve seen in Highland Park, these ones were actually dressed well, had all of there teeth, and were generally quite attractive, however disease ridden.

I went to a restaurant for sausages, carried out the transaction entirely in German, and wound up with some dish that was definitely not sausages. It was actually some deep fried slab of pork which was pretty good anyway. I’ve found that in Germany you will be allowed to sit at a restaurant indefinitely; Even if you haven’t ordered anything for the past hour. You have to actually ask for the bill every time, or they just let you sit. I ended up talking to these girls from Tel Aviv while I was pointlessly waiting for my check. They asked me why I was only in Berlin for three days and when I told them I had to work on Monday they seemed baffled by the idea. Americans suck at vacation.

Back at the hostel I tried to make friends, but the only English speaking group in the place was deeply engaged in some card game so I went to my room to read for a bit and try again later. I woke up half an hour ago and missed breakfast. Hopefully the long sleep has cured the jet lag that I’ve so far been treating with binge drinking.

1:00 am

Walked my ass off today. I went down ‘Under den Linden,’ the main historical strret in Berlin. The name means ‘Under the Lime trees,’ referring of course to the trees that line the street. The trees were all felled during Hitler’s reign to make his parades more visible, but have since been re-grown. The street has one of the only remaining gates of the original city walls (tors). The rest were leveled by bombings during WWII. On top of the gate is a statue called the Quadriga, which was stolen by Napoleon and kept briefly in Paris, but has since been restored. Beyond the gate is the Teirgarden, a park comparable in size to Central Park in NY. I walked back toward the hostel by a different route and took a wrong turn which sent me about two miles in the wrong direction, but also lead me to the remains of the Berlin Wall.

The Quadriga on Bradenburger Tor

Preserve that history, Berlin

Berlin Wall. Basically a glorified police baracade, cement and re-bar, totally climable without the gun turrets.

This hostel is actually kind of lame. It’s a nice place, but everyone is very low key and Berlin is enough of a tourist destination that the people here are largely non-English speaking. So again, I failed to find camaraderie, leaving me one for three. Tomorrow I will try to find a hostel that’s a bit more lively.



10:30 pm

I went to an archeology museum that was pretty amazing. It has this giant reconstruction of some excavated Greek temple with epic battle scenes carved into every surface. Extremely intense. It also had a large portion of the Ishtar gate. All of this stuff is B.C. or early hundreds A.C. After that I went to the Berlin Natural History Museum, which is about the lamest museum I’ve ever been to in my life.

Serpents, minotaurs, and genitals

Man-boy love

Fisticuffs

Ishtar Gate

Me and The Man himself at the Natural History Museum

Traditional German fare

The hostel switch was a roaring success. I met four people as soon as I walked in the door and hung out with them all night. We went on a guided pub crawl that gathers people from all of the local hostels. One guy was from Belgium and the other three were aerospace engineering chicks from U of M. I spent the early part of the pub crawl trying to prevent this drunken band of Argentineans from harassing one of the U of M girls, and though I was a real dick to him, one of them took some odd liking to me and we talked ineffectually over shots and a massive language barrier for the rest of the time. Somewhere between bars, on a poorly lit street corner, our tour guides gave us all free pulls from liquor bottles they produced from a backpack, Absinth included.

Some crazy Argentineans and Myself

U of M chick and Argentinean dude: A situation soon to be out of hand.

Complete ignorance of acceptable conduct can be a good thing.

Yes, resignedly, border line embarassed and degraded, and with infinite sarcasm, I present that cliche, that icon of frat boy party favors, that without which no European misadventure would be quite complete, two girls kissing.

Say ahhhhh...

Shitty club I was barely awake for

Time to make my exit

I awoke late this morning and barely made checkout. Got breakfast at the hostel and rode the subway to Berlin Hauptbahnhof to see if I could get to Paris. I booked an overnight train that takes about twelve hours and gets into Paris at 6:00 am tomorrow. Booking the train back to Frankfurt (which I had to do now because I have it on good authority that the French like to tell Americans that trains are full when they’re not) was considerably more complicated. Finally, three bad reservations and 25 euros later, I got a train at a time I can deal with. I spent five hours wandering around the station. The surrounding is right on the Rhine River and is actually pretty nice.




I’m about six hours into this train ride now; starving, filthy, and not even a little bit tired.